A Downed Pilot Who Ran Away in a Stolen Enemy Plane and Other Historic Escapes

A Downed Pilot Who Ran Away in a Stolen Enemy Plane and Other Historic Escapes

Khalid Elhassan - September 13, 2020

A Downed Pilot Who Ran Away in a Stolen Enemy Plane and Other Historic Escapes
Battered religious figures stand watch on a hill above a tattered valley in Nagasaki after the atomic bombing. Wikimedia

5. There Is Even a Japanese Term for “The Double Atomic Bombed

In 2006, a documentary called Twice Survived: The Doubly Atomic Bombed of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was produced, and screened at the United Nations. The documentary’s producers had tracked down 165 people who had been in Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, when that city was nuked, then ended up in Nagasaki when that city experienced a similar fate three days later on the 9th.

Those who survived were able to testify for the rest of their lives about what it was like to escape not one, but two atomic blasts. The Japanese, who coined the term hibakusha (“atomic bombed”) to describe the survivors of the atomic bombings, refer to those double survivors as the nijyuu hibakusha (“double atomic bombed”).

Advertisement